It is often important for advertisers to gather marketing information to assess the effectiveness of advertisements and promotions. Advertisements that may seem clever and attractive at a marketing meeting may not be successful in gaining the interest of consumers in the real world. Consumers may not understand the advertisement, they may be offended, or they may not relate to the message conveyed.
Advertisers have tried to improve the communication of goods and services to consumers by conducting surveys of random consumers in various ways. Individuals may approach consumers in public places, such as malls and sidewalks, to ask a series of questions related to a particular good or service. Similarly, written questionnaires may be mailed to a random selection of consumers in the hopes of eliciting valuable marketing information.
Although such efforts have sometimes yielded some indications as to how consumers think, not all consumers approached in this manner are enthusiastic to cooperate. Some may refuse to participate all together and may simply ignore the survey. Others may not give truthful answers to the survey questions, either as a disguised protest to being questioned or in an effort to provide answers that fit in with a preconceived “normal” response. Even if the consumer is a willing and honest participant, the consumer may not accurately recall his or her consumer-related actions and choices. Thus, in addition to the cost of manually gathering a statistically relevant number of responses, information gathered in this way may not provide a true picture of the consumers' practices and state of mind. Furthermore, the compilation of such responses and the transformation of the responses into meaningful market data may require a large amount of time, money and effort.
Therefore, there is a need for gathering more accurate information about the behavior of consumers with respect to the advertisements to which they are exposed and the shopping activities in which they engage and for analyzing the information to obtain indicators of the effectiveness of advertising efforts.